- ANTS, a new approach to deploying network services, bases interoperability on a programmable network model, not on individual networking protocols. The promise is automatic protocol upgrades, which can hasten progress toward a more responsive Internet.

- User-level communication architectures remove the operating system from the critical communication path, but designing protocols for these architectures is not trivial. The authors survey six design issues using examples from 11 communication systems, all of which have been implemented on a Myrinet network.

- The recent introduction of the VIA standard for cluster or system-area networks has opened the market for commercial user-level network interfaces. The authors examine how design decisions in prototype interfaces have helped shape this industry standard.

- Most network interfaces behave like disk interfaces and thereby limit the effectiveness of today's high-performance networks in a variety of ways. The authors argue that—to improve performance—future NIs should appear to their hosts more like memory than like disk interfaces.

- So far, networks have provided transport. Tomorrow's infrastructure will provide not only connectivity but information services as well. This article explains the sequential evolution of three phases of networking and explores the barriers to realizing the new information network paradigm.

Socket - Perl already makes socket functions available to you, but many versions don't load all the constants and structures you need. That's what the Socket module is for. The Socket module is bundled with Perl.